We’ve read a number of histories of the IBM PC and lived through that time, too. But we enjoyed [Gareth Edwards’] perspective in a post entitled The Misfit who Built the IBM PC. The titular character is Don Estridge, a decidedly atypical IBM employee who was instrumental in creating the personal computer market as we know it.
It’s not that IBM invented the personal computer — far from it. But the birth of the PC brought personal computers to the mainstream, especially in offices, and — much to IBM’s chagrin — opened up the market for people to make add-on cards for printers, videos, and other accessories.
IBM was a computer juggernaut in the late 1970s. Its divisions were the size of other companies, and some have compared it to a collection of mafia families. The company was heavily invested in big computers, and management was convinced that personal computing was, at most, an avenue to video games and most likely a fad.
Known as a conservative company, the PC project drew from a number of corporate misfits who had been technically successful but often punished for coloring outside the lines. They developed a prototype. The post quotes one of the people involved as saying, “The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, and it would show a picture of a rocket ship blasting off the screen. We decided to show the Management Committee the rocket ship.” Wise choice.
That’s just the kind of tidbit in this post, and if you have any interest in computer history of the 1980s, you’ll definitely want to check it out. Estridge died in 1985, so he didn’t get to see much of the result of the market he opened up. Of course, there were many other players who appear in this story. The PC has many parents, as you might expect.
We’ve done our own recounting of this story. However, we tend to obsess more over the internals.
“The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, and it would show a picture of a rocket ship blasting off the screen. We decided to show the Management Committee the rocket ship.”
Hah. Here in western Europe of the 80s it could have been the other way round.. 😂
Well, at least in my country, I believe.
“It’s not that IBM invented the personal computer — far from it. But the birth of the PC brought personal computers to the mainstream, especially in offices, and — much to IBM’s chagrin — opened up the market for people to make add-on cards for printers, videos, and other accessories. ”
This merely partly correct. AFAIK the IBM PC model 5150 wasn’t available in Europe before 1983.
The Sirius 1/Victor 9000 was one of first PC available here.
So the influence of the IBM PC was limited.
What really was important was the birth of the Turbo XT clones, I think.
The whole ecosystem of expansion cards was made for the clones rather than the IBM PC.
Clones that came from far east by the way, rather than the North American market.
(MS-DOS and PC BIOS compatible clones with Hercules compatible graphics cards and an 8088/V20 processor.)
Also, before this happened, there were various “MS-DOS compatibles” (not IBM PC compatibles) that tried to establish on market. Similar to how CP/M machines tried to in the 1970s (Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080, NorthStar etc) .
Unfortunately, they didn’t succeed because major software applications were written in a way that they did low-level stuff that only worked on IBM PCs.
So it’s not like the IBM PC was any good or special. It maybe simply succeeded because it had been backed up by then-powerful American software industry.
Silicon Valley was still going strong back then, after all.
“So it’s not like the IBM PC was any good or special.”
I have to correct myself here, there’s something very remarkable about the IBM PCs.
They were being built rock-solid and had good shielding. The PSU wasn’t too bad, either, even if required more oomph to power a hard disk (was a 63W model; the XT model had a stronger one, AFAIK).
The industrial look and modular design also made it seem like a serious piece of equipment.
If I hadn’t known it’s an US American product, I could have had easily mistaken it for something being built by Siemens or Nixdorf.
All in all that’s very positive, I think. IBM did a good job here, I think. It acted very German here, if I may say so.
The behemoth of a company realized that quality and reputation are being more important than making quick money, apparently. The typewriter and mainframe background of IBM maybe played a role here, too, not sure.
Anyway. The looks and build quality was good and had a positive influence to the clone market, too.
Many third-party PC chassises tried to mimic this design principle, even if they didn’t look like exact copies of an IBM PC nor had reached same high build quality most of time.
IBM was serious about that shielding.
My dad was an IBMer when the 5150 was announced and we ended up getting one about a year after that.
Dad was also a ham radio operator, and noticed that he could hear the computer on his radio and random keystrokes would appear when he transmitted.
He mentioned this on an internal forum (and the local pc store’s suggestion to wrap the keyboard and cable in foil) and shortly two engineers from Boca visited.
They ended up replacing the whole system – taking the old one back for more analysis.
I remember feeling it weighed a ton.
Or to put it this way, to many companies and users it was MS-DOS that was important. Not the IBM PC, it was just the packaging.
MS-DOS, at the time, was seen as the spiritual successor to CP/M.
Comparable to how OS/2 later was seen as the successor to DOS.
And in both examples, things had changed a bit from the initial expectation.
I forgot to mention, it wasn’t too uncommon to get a clone motherboard from, say, Taiwan or Hongkong and equip it with copied ROMs of IBM BIOS and ROM BASIC.
That way, users had a very modern/fast motherboard with very good PC compatibility. All the IBM specific bugs were being included, after all.
Needles to say that the NEC V20 from Japan was a popular upgrade to the slower intel 8088 that continued to be shipped with the IBM PC and IBM XT for the years to follow.
The NEC V20/V30 was also compatible with the updated i8086 instructions set that was included with 80186/80188 and 80286 processors (known as 8086-2 ISA, I think).
For some reason the 8086 and 8088 never got this upgrade.
Sometimes you have to think outside of the box, and other times you just have to throw out the box entirely.
Or just stuff it all into the biggest, heaviest, beige-est box you can fab by the 10k lots.
I enjoyed reading the linked story, and then went on to read the one about the Vector computer.
have been dabling in vintage computers for a long time and had never heard about vector computers before. such a shame.
I brought Paul Allen and Bill Gates to NCR in 1976 to install their Basic on our processor display/ processor, detachable kb. Detachable disks. In a few months they had ms basic running (in 1976/77). The NCR 7200 with Ms basic.
When asked how they developed it Paul Allen replied that they took a copy of it from a client. Bill Gates could not attend the first meeting – he was at another. Paul Allen came in a bolo tie and boots.
That last paragraph kind of baffles me. Gates and Allen didn’t have any clients until they developed BASIC for the Altair. So, how could they have taken a copy of MS BASIC from a client?
They had done a traffic light control system before basic. However I suspect what they might have meant is that they already had developed it for one client (Altair) and could sell the same software to another client.
After this one of IBMs motto’s became ‘cherish wild ducks’
Basically to remind managers to not discard misfits too quickly.
That reminds me of something. I remember reading that experienced companies traditionally had kept a few tinkerers around, because they knew that they’re valuable.
Tinkerers not seldomly develop something that seems useless at first, but then might turn out to be valuable just a few years later.
HP was one of such companies, I believe. Back then when it still was doing great in the measurement device business (scopes, analyzers etc).
I still have an original 5150 at a corner desk, and occasionally fire it up to remind me of the old days. Some tantalum capacitors have exploded, and one TTL chip in parity detection had to be replaced. Other than those, it is working solidly. But so are my Osborne 1 and Kaypro 4. Those computers I have saved, because they were the machines I worked with at start of my so-called IT career.
I am an ex-IBMer. My original is also still working with the 5 meg hard disk moved from the expansion chassis. I added a co-processor so I could add Fortran for my college-student son. I put in two half-height floppy drives (360 and 720) and run DOS 3.3.
PC-DOS 3.30 was neat.
The documentation was well done, too. Loved that parrot mascot.. :)
The market success of the IBM 5150 was a problem for IBM; the group that created that product lied to upper management at IBM, they projected only modest sales of those units and the accompany peripherals.. When the market made the 5150 a roaring success all hell broke loose inside IBM, IBM didn’t want to be seen as a company that announced a product and then couldn’t deliver that product to customers in a timely manner. The planning and forecasting people involved in the 5150 got in trouble within IBM; some were made examples of, others were sidelined; they were seen as examples of what not to do. The story is too long for a comment section. I worked at IBM at the time in another software area.
Could you post the story somewhere? Or, heck, email it to me? :p I love stuff like this!
My first PC was a 1985 vintage IBM XT with 256K RAM, Hercules monochrome, and not much else. I got it for free, then spent $30 for a used 10 Mb hard drive (full height!), a green-screen monitor, a keyboard, and a DOS 3.1 disk. The guy I bought those from was also nice enough to format the hard drive for me (I hadn’t learned how to use DOS yet). That was in 1991.
The original invoice was still stuck to the base of the computer. In 1985, only 6 years previously, that same computer had cost someone around $5000!
From my (very)ancient memory the XT was an abbreviation for experimental. XT were first released in Australia to see acceptability. Australia being similar to USA, but very small, hence if the XT was a failure it would not hurt IBM Domestic or World-trade reputation. I can not remember whether floppy disks (invented by IBM) write/read from the outer to the inner, I suspect so. But with the experimental XT the floppy disk read/write traveling from the spindle side to the outer. It was not an adopted floppy format.
Former IBM PC Company employee here. My recollection is that XT stood for “Extended Technology.” I’d have to go down a rabbit hole to confirm that, though. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.